Why is Diwali advertising so dull?

By scale and spends, Diwali’16 is being compared to the American Superbowl and Christmas in the UK. By the creative chops on display, not so muchAmit Bapna | ETBrandEquity | October 26, 2016, 08:00 IST

Ads from Amazon, Cadbury and OnePlusThe Christmas season and the Super Bowl are two calendar events that witness a great proliferation of not just marketing spends but stellar creative work. They are marked much in advance in the marketer’s calendar. Super Bowl has seen some iconic creative work for brands over the years including Coke’s ‘Mean Joe Greene’ (1979), Apple ‘Sledgehammer’ (1984), Budweiser ‘Frogs’ (1995) and more recently Doritos’ ‘Ultrasound’ and Audi’s ‘Commander’. Not to forget Oreo’s famous blackout tweet in the 2013 Super Bowl match.

In the UK, retail as a category has the most fun with brands like John Lewis and Harvey Nichols leading the pack. John Lewis fans are already looking forward to what the UK retailer has in store for its next Christmas campaign. Nils Leonard, former chief creative officer of Grey London had said, on the sidelines of the D&AD in London earlier this year, “We hope that we’ll have that Christmas ad that people will like and that can be the game-changer.”

Closer home too, the festive season gets robust attention from marketers. While chief spenders are seemingly ecommerce players, other categories like auto, apparel, durables, cell phones, home décor, and many others, are equally buoyant. So, is this our Super Bowl? Says Ram Madhvani, ad filmmaker, Equinox, “There are two seasons, which is advertising rush-hour: IPL and Diwali. Everyone wants their ads timed around these.”

However, a large chunk of the communication ends up pretty formulaic – like the ‘happy family and a dog’ automobile ads one sees by the dozen. Creative is constantly playing catch-up to high-spends. Or maybe, marketers for now are happy with the lower hanging fruit and looking for salience and immediate conversions.

Festive-sale campaign communication so far has been largely transactional, pegged on sales and discounts. Manish Tiwary, VP, category management, Amazon India agrees and shares how they tried approaching it differently: “We’ve tried to underpin the big-heartedness that underlies festivities and thus themed the festive month as ‘Tyohaar Bade Dilwala’.” The brief given to the creative agency was to make it a great Indian festival without necessarily calling it a sale.

Another ecommerce brand Jabong launched ‘You Are The Festival’; built around evoking the essence of festivities by celebrating who we are with a song playing in the background and montages of people traipsing around talking more about the selection than about offers. Snapdeal continued with its ‘Unbox Zindagi’ theme that has changed to ‘Unbox Diwali’.

It is a fact that most players around this time are too caught up with promoting sales during Diwali, to worry about doing great thematic advertising, which possibly has more of a slow burn effect. So car-brands talk only of the percentage discount on offer and the laptops and the mobile brands too keep highlighting price. Nothing different or unique there. Sumanto Chattopadhyay, executive creative director – South Asia, Ogilvy Mumbai recalls the Big Bazaar ‘Paper Phataka’ ad from last Diwali as something that went beyond both ‘special offers’ and the cliché of ‘heart-warming’ advertising. For him, most brands in categories like electronics, home furnishings and gifting-related items prefer to play it safe, with low-risk sales promotions that reliably translate into sales spikes.

Here is how the planner in Arvind Krishnan, managing director, BBH India explains this. “Over 90% of advertising is not interesting, and that holds true for festival advertising as well.” There is this sea of sameness, with themes repeated over years, across categories and markets that one can spot, whether its deals, discounts or affinity building communication, he adds. Currently, in India, there is too much focus on maintaining the tone of voice that fits the festival, instead of letting the brand lead the dance, say Nima Namchu, chief creative officer, Havas Worldwide. The way John Lewis and Harvey Nichols manage to do for their Christmas campaigns.

Amaresh Godbole, managing director, India at DigitasLBi is candid enough to admit that both agencies and clients, are guilty of too much generic ‘festive’ work with the bulk of communication following the same trope. More fireworks. More gifting. More people. Finish with a discount/offer.”

We were still a few critical days shy of the final push towards Diwali at the time of going to print. Who knows — the industry may surprise us with fireworks of the creative variety in the next few days. If not, there’s at least the regular lights and sounds of the festival to look forward to; and the hope that at least next year, the creative sparks will fly.